Grammatical oddity

[msmemory_archive]

Something I've seen a few places lately, which really makes me twitch: the hyphenated contraction. I'm talking about did-n't, could-n't, and so forth. Surely not a legitimate usage! Ugh.

Comments

[herooftheage.livejournal.com]

A funny thing is - it used to be. I've seen several 19th century facsimiles that looked like they hyphenated contractions as the rule - I think they basically thought of them as compound words, which used to be hyphenated much more often than is the current practice.

[msmemory.livejournal.com]

Did the 19th c facsimiles hyphenate them across line breaks, which was the usage I'm deprecating in the 21st c manuscript?

[herooftheage.livejournal.com]

Not that I recall, though at the time I wasn't looking for that - I was looking specifically at how compound word phrases became one word. A 19th/early 20th century manuscript is likely to write "length-wise", for example.